Rights and justice

Gender Justice : from MDGs to SDGs: Christian Aid’s vision for poverty eradication is rooted in a commitment to equality for all

To coincide with this year’s meeting of the ‘Commission on the Status of Women’, Christian Aid sets out its position on gender and the post-2015 development agenda.

Drawing on input from partners in Afghanistan, Angola, Brazil and Iraq, Christian Aid argues that gender must be at the heart of any new development framework, and that this should be manifest in a new stand-alone goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as through the mainstreaming of gender throughout the new goals and targets.

It also argues that targets should address previously neglected areas, such as gender-based violence, and that the impact of both climate change and macro-economic policy on women and girls, should also be considered by policy-makers.

Christian Aid recently launched a report called 'The scandal of inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean' - identifying the progress that has been made in the region, but also the areas of inequality.

Despite an economic boom that has catapulted Brazil into the ranks of the wealthiest countries, inequality levels there remain among the worst in the world.

Although it is said to have produced 19 millionaires a day since 2007, some 16 million people – equivalent to the population of the Netherlands – continue to live in abject poverty.

More than twice that number, 40 million people or around 20 per cent of the population, fall below the World Bank’s national poverty line.

Research commissioned by Christian Aid from CEBRAP (the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning), in a new report, ‘The Real Brazil: The inequality behind the statistics’, starkly illustrates how inequality continues to blight progress in a country with a GDP now higher than that of the UK.

Women produce around half the world’s food, yet their contribution often goes unrecognised. Compared to men, they generally enjoy less support for their farms and businesses, and have less access to land and other productive resources.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, closing this ‘gender gap’ in agriculture would increase women’s contribution to food production and enterprise, reducing the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17% or by 100 to 150 million people.

How to do this was the question that brought together nine development agencies with an academic and members of DFID food team in October 2011. They shared their experiences, the experiences of their partners and the communities they work with around the world, and produced a joint paper to capture some of the lessons learned and to influence policy makers towards more gender-sensitive support for smallholders.

Last year Christian Aid organised a one-day conference to identify lessons, challenges and future priorities for partner organisations supporting communities to influence and hold their governments to account.

Speakers included representatives from Oxford University, the Institute of Development Studies, Minority Rights Group as well as Christian Aid partners funded by the UK’s Department for International Development through its Governance and Transparency Fund.

The resultant report – "Power and Governance: Lessons and Challenges" – draws best practices and recommendations from the conference, and is a useful tool in understanding the challenges of civil society governance work, the complex power relations that affect its implementation, and the importance of reviewing programme activities and objectives through a "power lens."

This paper sets out Christian Aid's understanding of poverty, which is not simply a matter of people living on less than a dollar a day but much more complex. We see poverty, fundamentally, as a lack of power - economic power, yes, but also personal, social and political power.

Poverty is, at its core, political. We cannot solve poverty by giving people a little more than they have. Instead, we must work as part of a global social movement to create the freedom for people living in poverty to exercise greater power over their own lives. By recognising the true nature of poverty in all our work, we aim to challenge the structural causes.

Countering corruption is of fundamental importance in the battle against global poverty because of its impact on developing countries. Christian Aid argues that Western governments are not doing enough to champion legitimate business practices.